Counsel on Tax Dollars and Sense

Lily Batchelder, Professor of Law and Public Policy, has taken a leave of absence to become chief tax counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, where she served as a law clerk in 2001. “I’m glad to welcome Lily back to the Senate Finance Committee’s tax team,” said Committee Chairman Max Baucus in a May statement. “Lily’s wide range of experience and expert knowledge of tax and public policy make her an invaluable adviser to the Finance Committee as we continue our efforts to create jobs, help small businesses grow, close the tax gap, and explore tax reform.”

Batchelder has been an adviser to policymakers, public agencies, and nonprofits particularly on matters at the intersection of tax and social policy. Her recent scholarship has focused on efficiency in the design of tax incentives—she has a forthcoming book, $750 Billion Misspent? Getting More from Tax Incentives, co-authored with Austin Nichols and Eric Toder—and estate tax reform, on which she testified before the Senate Finance Committee in 2008. Batchelder is also an affiliated professor at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and an affiliated scholar at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She was a tax associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C., and New York before joining NYU Law’s faculty in 2005, where she was a co-director of the Furman Academic Scholars Program.

Batchelder’s colleagues applaud the appointment. “She’s good at understanding theory; she has empirical skills; and a primary interest in her work is real-world ideas,” says Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation. “She’s interested in figuring out feasible policies that could actually be enacted and affect the political process.”